


One Bed That Wasn't Slept In, and Another That Was

by ancientreader



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: AU after TSoT, First Time, M/M, Or not, Sharing a Bed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-01
Updated: 2015-01-01
Packaged: 2018-02-28 17:00:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2740118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ancientreader/pseuds/ancientreader
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John doesn’t mind sharing a bed with Sherlock. Sherlock dissents. Things go downhill from there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Bed That Wasn't Slept In, and Another That Was

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mildredandbobbin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mildredandbobbin/gifts).



> There is now [a beautiful piece of art for this story](http://littlegreenspacequeer.tumblr.com/post/144286466023/all-john-can-think-to-reply-is-you-planned), made by [MissLovegood](http://archiveofourown.org/users/MissLovegood), who goes by littlegreenspacequeer on Tumblr. I love the way it captures the doubling of John's and Sherlock's perceptions and I'm honored to have inspired it!

The Travelodge off the A11 in Barton Mills is, apparently, where a detective and a blogger fetch up when a murder case concludes late in the evening and said detective and said blogger are afterward obliged to give statements. John refuses to drive them back to London, because he has had barely any sleep since the night before last; Sherlock, who apart from catnaps has been going for nearly twice as long, tries to insist that he's fine, but as John will not hand over the keys to the hire car he finally goes for the option of Stroppily Booking a Room. Meanwhile John rings Paul and Helen: it's well after one, but they made him promise. Em has been asleep for hours already.

Mary Morstan Watson bolted a month after Em was born (and did Mary really have an aunt Emilia after whom their daughter is named? John's pretty sure he's never going to know) – running, it transpired, from a shadowy media magnate who was blackmailing her because, of all lunatic things, she was in hiding from her past as a paid assassin. Mycroft, admitting to John and Sherlock that he had not known of Mary's history, looked like a man who has unexpectedly been handed a ripe durian.

As for John, he was dumb with shock. He had a new baby, and not only no wife but a no-wife who turned out never to have existed. If he had had any stupefaction left over, he would have been obliged to apply it to how immediately and thoroughly the Holmeses stepped in. Grandmama Helen, Grandpapa Paul. Uncle Sherlock! Uncle _Mycroft,_ for God's sake. John might have balked at accepting their time and their gifts of useful baby equipment except that Emilia needed them. John can admit that he did too – especially in those first weeks and months, when he could barely eat or sleep and there was that time when he would have zombie-walked straight out the door of a Tube carriage but that the other passengers shouted after him to take his baby. John then had to sit on a bench with Emilia in his arms for a long time, shaking and sweating, before he could get on the escalator without falling over. When, after some months, he roused himself from this confused state, it was to discover that 221B still felt like home and that his upstairs room had space sufficient for his own bed and a crib. A toddler's bed will also be manageable. Someday Emilia will need her own room, and then … but John avoids thinking about that.

( _Maybe if Sherlock moved his experiments down to 221C and we partitioned off the living room …_ )

This investigation is the first time John's accompanied Sherlock overnight on a case since – well, since his stag night, come to think of it, when "accompany" meant "watch Sherlock vomit on the Mayfly Man's rug." Between clinic and parenthood, he's rarely been free to come along on any cases at all: has had to content himself with breaking into Sherlock's narratives with scoff-inducing questions over takeaway suppers when Sherlock is at home.

Which isn't often. Sherlock's been taking all kinds of work, even outside London, all along. It puzzles John, though he's never said anything about it, that his friend no longer insists on a 9 or a 10 – seems restless, in fact, always wanting to be anywhere other than where he is at any given moment. John might conclude the problem is Emilia, for who could have imagined Sherlock living with a baby, except that when Sherlock _is_ at home he doesn't avoid her: rather the opposite, in fact. He pretends to pay her no mind, but when she's hungry a piece of bread and cheese will have appeared in front of her before John is out of his chair. At the applesauce and mashed-banana stage Sherlock used to quietly and efficiently feed her. He will even go so far as to change her, though he eschews the changing table and baby wipes, instead using a spray attachment to rinse her in the bathtub and then patting her dry with kitchen roll that he afterward drops on the floor. He claims this caretaking is simply a function of aversion to her noises and smells. John, registering that Sherlock handles the baby as gently as he handles his violin, lets the lie slide. Anyway, whatever keeps Sherlock edgy and in motion, it's not Emilia.

John signs off with the elder Holmeses just as the desk clerk hands Sherlock their key cards. "Your parents send their love," John says, but a look has passed over Sherlock's face: a spasm, fleeting. Pained. "What's up?"

"Nothing. Well. There's only the one room. Unfortunate."

There _had_ been a scuffle with the suspect's wife, who got a solid couple of punches into Sherlock after he told her what her husband had been up to in Edinburgh the week before. John resolves to check Sherlock over quickly as soon as they've washed up. She was a strong woman; she could easily have cracked a rib and Sherlock, the idiot, would never say a word. Who cares if there's only one room?

*

Oh, but the one room contains exactly one bed. A king, which should be plenty given that John is not a large man and every time he's happened to catch sight of Sherlock sleeping, his friend has been curled quietly into himself. But the moment they cross the threshold Sherlock throws two of the four pillows into the corner farthest from the door and drops his coat next to them for a blanket.

"Hang on," John says, uneasily, "the bed's huge. Unless you kick your sleeping partners?"

Sherlock stills for a moment, his back to John. Then: "I wouldn't know."

His tone doesn't invite further inquiry. John opens his mouth to ask the obvious question anyway, then closes it and starts again. "There's no sense you sleeping on the floor, seriously, look at that thing."

No reply. Sherlock heads for the bathroom.

"Call it an experiment," John says after him, and then hears what he has said.

Sherlock stops in his tracks. His head is bowed; in quarter profile, John can just see him swallow. "No," Sherlock says.

Oh God. "Sherlock – I'm sorry – I know – I didn't mean – " To continue, John would have to say something like "I didn't mean to invite you to experiment with me, and so make light of how you feel." But he can't say that, of course; it would be cruel.

Only he has already been cruel.

"You _know._ Tell me, John, what do you know?" This flatly, almost not a question.

What John knows. What John has known since the wedding ( _a glimpse, in the crowd of dancers, of the look on Sherlock's face as he laid down on the music stand the waltz he had written for John and Mary_ ). How the hell did they get here so fast? Five minutes ago John was on the phone with Sherlock's parents and they were checking into a room in a cheap motorway hotel and now –

"I didn't mean to bring it up, I'm sorry. Shit. I understand it's not – not fun, I just – we can share the bed, that's all. It's fine. I'm fine with that."

And now it is as if someone has opened a door on a small fire that has been dying down for lack of oxygen and the fire roars up and fills the room it's in and the next room too, and flame is solid limbs seizing air and shoving themselves out all the windows and _this house is on fire_ and Sherlock is, his rage is immense, it fills the room, it fills the Travelodge, it could fill all of fucking England and Sherlock says, cold and low:

"Fine, are you? Quite, quite fine? All right then, spend thirty seconds imagining what it might be like to pass the night in bed with someone whose merest touch leaves your skin singing. Whose kisses you can imagine perfectly because you have often seen them bestowed on others. The scent of whom makes your mouth go dry. Say you feel and imagine and experience these things and you know you will never have them for your own. Imagine passing the night in bed with that person and not being permitted to so much as rest your forefinger against the line of his back. Stop being in love with your own sensitivity and compassion and _pay attention_ for a change!"

The aftermath of the fire, the house burnt to the ground, the world silent and time stopped – _I know,_ John had said: but this was knowing of another order – the earth halted in its orbit, until time starts again. All John can think to reply is, "You planned my wedding," as it were to say, "You disemboweled yourself before me and never flinched."

Time continues to move. John's heart marks it. The hideous clock on the bedside table changes over from 1:54 to 1:55. "Well," Sherlock says, quietly, "I thought, _That way he'll be happy, and I won't have to live with him._ Apparently genius isn't all it's cracked up to be."

John can't form a coherent thought; all he can manage is a dim imperative to do something, anything, toward Sherlock's well-being, and out of this imperative he says, "If, if I leave you alone now, do you think you could try and sleep? Please. Please just try and sleep. I'll come back in a few hours. Please. Sleep."

Before he has reached the pavement in front of the Travelodge, and yet still far too late, it comes to him that what Sherlock is avoiding at Baker Street is _him_.

*

John walks. Sometimes he drops into a microsleep between one step and the next, wakes himself stumbling. He follows the motorway, as far from traffic as the verge will allow. He would like to experience oblivion for a little while, but not death. "Experience oblivion": the self-contradiction chases its tail in his bleary mind for some unfathomable time and then is replaced by an auditory hallucination: not words, but pure sound, the sound of Sherlock's voice, his anger, the sound of his longing for John.

The sound of Sherlock driven to his limit.

The anger and longing are unfamiliar to John's experience. Aren't they? If something happened to Emilia he would rage, rend his garments, despair. But she is safe and happy; those feelings belong only to his nightmares. He's never felt for a lover what Sherlock feels for him. _The scent of whom makes your mouth go dry._ John never felt such longing for Mary, not even when she abandoned him and Emilia and he spent months stunned like an ox; he felt betrayed, he felt lost, but he never yearned for her like that ... He has never felt that for anyone –

No, that's wrong. That's wrong. He _has_ felt that terrible vast longing. … When he felt it, he was running, and then something knocked him down, but he roused himself; the road he was trying to cross was immensely wide, the widest river ever seen; on its opposite bank, a man lay supine. Blood in the man's hair. _Black is the color._ John struggled toward the man, with nothing existing inside himself but to go to him, to lay hands on him. To feel the specific aliveness of that one body –

He finds that he has sat down on the verge and that his face is wet.

He had thought he would never put his hands on that living body again.

Sitting in the grass of the verge he catalogues the occasions on which he has touched Sherlock. _Get the mobile out of my jacket._ Putting him to bed after Irene Adler drugged him, that always-alert body instead lax in John's arms and so, so warm. The times when he cleaned Sherlock's wounds. Times, fewer of these, when Sherlock needed sutures and balked at a visit to A &E so John sewed him up at home.

Handcuffed together, the night before … No, that doesn't bear thinking of.

Punching Sherlock repeatedly, chinning him, the night of his return. Learning to waltz. "Draw the curtains, will you?" ( _Because God forbid anybody across the way should see me take you in my arms and imagine that I'm your lover._ Meaning: _God forbid_ I _should imagine I'm your lover._ )

Sitting on the verge, John thinks: _You're not worth the mug he drops an eyeball into. Calling him your best friend, and him practically catatonic with happiness to learn he meant that much to you. You absolute shit._

Drunkenly sliding into Sherlock's knee … That was an accident. It _was …_

Hugging him after that mad, glorious speech at the wedding. ( _When it was safe to touch him, because you had just stood up in front of all those people and declared yourself Mary's. Now nobody could misconstrue your touching Sherlock. Least of all yourself._ ) And Sherlock stood frozen in John's arms. What must he have been feeling at that moment?

Or, really, all that day. And the day before, and the day before that – John has no idea how long Sherlock has been feeling … what he feels.

He doesn't know how long he himself has been feeling it. He locked it up tight after one terrible day at Barts, having never admitted it to his consciousness in the first place.

*

John returns at dawn, footsore, chilled, heartsick, afraid, loathing himself. Sherlock is asleep, folded on the floor, his coat beneath him, his back tucked against the wall. Since his time ( _away_ ), John has noticed, Sherlock prefers to avoid having his back to any door; and though to call him hypervigilant might be putting it a shade too strongly, it's a measure of how tired he is that John's entrance didn't wake him.

Even in sleep, he looks unhappy. Shame fills John's throat.

Sherlock has sometimes called him an idiot; it scarcely stings – "idiot" is no more than the sound with which Sherlock expresses his dismay at finding himself, yet again, alone wherever the brilliant light of observation and interest has brought him. What would hurt, what John has never once heard from Sherlock's lips but richly deserves, is the word "liar."

Or "coward." "Coward" would suit.

John has been practicing inside his head for the past hour. Inside his head, now, the words come almost easily. _I'm in love with you, and I have been for years,_ he thinks at Sherlock's sleeping self, and then he clears his throat to wake the hearer so he can say it out loud.

Sherlock rouses all at once and sits up, then drops his head backward against the wall, _thunk._ "I apologize," he says.

"You have nothing to apologize for. I was an arse. And, Sherlock, I've realized something. I've been lying to myself, to both of us. If you – if you haven't decided that I'm a waste of your time, then – "

" _Don't_."

"But – "

"No, John, listen to me." Sherlock's voice is shockingly patient. "We are not at Baker Street, where your habits, including your sexual and romantic habits, are well established. My … outburst last night produced in you considerable emotional upheaval, and by my reckoning you have had perhaps four hours' sleep in the past forty-eight. You have always had poor tolerance for sleep deprivation, and lack of sleep disinhibits people and impairs their judgment. Under these circumstances you might well imagine yourself to reciprocate my feelings. Perhaps you even believe that you would enjoy sexual contact with me.

"But it's an illusion, John. Once you're home, back in the context where you know yourself to be the unimpeachably heterosexual John Watson, where everyone you know has heard you deny the possibility of a liaison with me, you'll see that. So. Drop this, please. I'm glad enough to be your friend; I've no wish to become the embarrassing memory of a moment of emotional confusion in a Travelodge in Barton Mills."

There doesn't seem to be any possible reply to this.

Sherlock, since he is the one who has had some sleep, drives them to his parents' place, where they pick up Emilia and leave the hire car for Paul or Helen to return while they take a train the rest of the way. They don't talk much, but Sherlock holds Emilia so John can sleep.

*

It transpires that Sherlock is wrong. The only thing about John's revelation that changes when they're back at Baker Street is this: it grows more certain. He puts Em to bed at eight, then goes downstairs with his hands empty of occupation. Sherlock's mostly not home, in which case the sitting room feels not just quiet but stripped raw, as it did after Sherlock jumped; but if he's home, then John doesn't know where to look or what to say. He wants to look at Sherlock, because Sherlock is beautiful and desirable and John loves him, but when – one evening about a week after Barton Mills – John speaks Sherlock's name, meaning to tell his friend this, Sherlock gives him one sharp glance, then flings himself into his coat and clatters downstairs and out the door, not to return till the next morning, silently.

God knows what he believes John was about to say. Surely it wouldn't be unwelcome to learn that John really did love him, or would it? Perhaps Sherlock _is_ so attached to the conclusion he's already drawn that he'll cling to it even if faced with contrary evidence. John imagines going into Sherlock's bedroom, lying down on his bed, and sleeping there, awaiting him – when he found John in his bed, Sherlock would accept this as proof of love and desire, wouldn't he? Then John realizes he got the idea from a half-remembered secondary school history lesson about Cleopatra rolled up in a rug and he sees it's all wrong, this model of intrigue and temptation. If he's to have any hope of winning Sherlock, he can't go about it by being sneaky.

Or maybe there's no point in trying: maybe all John's lies and denials have made it impossible for Sherlock to believe in him. Maybe Sherlock would be happier, in the long run, if John and Emilia just moved out. John is thinking more and more along these lines as the weeks go by and the border between himself and Sherlock seems more and more impassable.

Then he has lunch with Harry.

*

They have been meeting near John's clinic on the first Wednesday of every month for the past five. Emilia's birth hadn't given Harry whatever jolt she needed to quit drinking, but Mary's disappearance did. (How she found out about it, John still doesn't know, since he wasn't speaking to her at the time; he suspects Holmes involvement.) She'd texted John a photo of her six-month AA coin and asked whether he would consider keeping in touch. _Yes,_ he texted back, _but I don't think I'm ready to see you yet._ Then she stayed sober for another month, and another month after that, and when all the months together became a year, John allowed himself to remember his affection for her and to feel hope. So that was the start of their lunches.

Un-pickled, Harry doesn't miss much, and anyway John has bags under his eyes and seems to have lost the skill of shaving himself without drawing blood. Harry's skin is clear and her eyes are bright. "You look like hell," she tells him, sweating, between bites of prawn vindaloo.

John looks at his plate, pushes his fork around. He hasn't confided in Harry in nearly two decades, not since the time she got drunk and told his girlfriend at uni that John worried about whether said girlfriend's orgasms were real. But Harry's been sober nearly a year and a half … at some point he has to try trusting her again. It may as well be now.

"Mm," Harry says when he's done. "So he loves you and you don't know how to convince him that you love him back – it's not a matter of one mad romantic night at a motorway inn."

Another thing John forgot during Harry's drunk years, along with his affection for her, is her bracing way of describing situations he's torn up about, that somehow makes them seem more manageable.

"You know … Under the circumstances, I hate to bring this up, but – You remember that night we had dinner, maybe four or five months after you moved in with him?"

John winces.

"Yeah, thought so. I was a proper twat, baiting you about him. I'm sorry for it. But what you said to me, I don't know how it stuck, drunk as I was, but do you remember it?"

"Just saying 'I'm not gay, and he's not my boyfriend.'"

"Right, but that wasn't all of it. You said that, and then you said, 'How many people do I have to tell, for Christ's sake?' Shouted it, actually. Though we were both shouting by then. It made my head swim."

"Jesus, everybody – _everybody –_ thought we were shagging, and they let me know it. And I was such a berk about it, getting angrier and angrier – "

Harry raises her eyebrows at him. "So, how many people _did_ you say it to? 'I'm not gay and I don't love Sherlock Holmes'?"

"Oh, God."

"In front of Sherlock? No, let me rephrase that: 'In front of Sherlock,' full stop, not an interrogation point."

"Not every time, but yeah, he must have heard it out of my mouth a dozen times. More."

"So then."

Add another item to the list of Things John Has Forgotten: how good it feels to look at your sister when you've both just had the same brilliant idea at the same time. "Do you know how to work the recording function on this thing?" he says.

Harry's old phone, the gift from Clara that she passed on to John after he got home from Afghanistan, fetched up in the Thames in April of 2011, along with John himself; he managed to hang on to the aluminium crutch that solved the case, but the phone was a dead loss. Harry gets John's technology sorted and then says, almost under her breath, "I still miss her."

John used to roll his eyes at Harry's grief over Clara – what can a lying drunk expect but to alienate the people she loves? Quite recently he has come to understand that he's done no better. He reaches for her hand and gives it a squeeze.

*

Between his job and caring for Emilia, John doesn't have scads of free time, but within twenty-seven days he manages to visit everyone on his list, even the proprietors of the Cross Keys Inn. Everyone else – everyone but Mary and Irene – is in London. It helps that Sarah Sawyer's clinic isn't far from John's and that one visit to NSY happily accounts for three people: not only Lestrade and Sally Donovan, but also Molly Hooper, who blushes when John finds her having lunch in Greg's office. Lestrade puts him in touch with a strange, bearded, Sherlock-admiring Anderson.

Angelo claps him on the back and introduces Em to gnocchi with _pesto alla genovese_.

Mrs. Hudson, of course, is seventeen steps from home. Tracking down the women John has dated since he began living with Sherlock keeps him busy for two evenings, and he's frankly terrified before the first one he calls, but as it turns out, when he explains what he wants they all agree, even the one who also informs him he's a right prick. The one who hangs up when he identifies himself calls back after he sends an abjectly apologetic text. Jeanette laughs and reminds John that she always thought he was a very good boyfriend.

*

Now John has to work out how to ambush Sherlock.

But he dismisses that notion almost instantly; one, it's sneaky, and even if it were possible for him to set up an ambush without Sherlock's noticing it, he wasn't going to do sneaky; two, when it comes right down to it he's throwing himself on Sherlock's mercy anyway even in asking to present his evidence, given that Sherlock has twice shut down the discussion before it began.

John does devote some thought to timing. He needs to be sure he can at least begin this conversation without being interrupted by Emilia, so it has to take place after she's asleep. However, an evening spent in Sherlock's presence when he, John, knows that in an hour or two he will be making the only play he has – the idea is risible. He'd never be able to simulate calm, not even the uncomfortable polite calm that has settled over 221B in the weeks since Barton Mills. Result: Emilia screaming because Papa is so on edge; Sherlock out the door, for who knows how long this time. And John is already prone to nightmares about parting from Sherlock after angry words.

*

Three days after his next lunch with Harry, when she commiserates with him and toasts his luck with soda water, John's chance arrives. Em has been asleep for an hour when Sherlock comes in, stripping his gloves off and shaking rain out of his hair. "Hello, John," he says, quietly, then raises his head sharply as if someone has rung a warning bell, and turns on his heel.

"Wait, Sherlock, please!" John almost throws himself against the flat door. "Five minutes, that's all I'm asking. Please."

Sherlock looks away, blinking, then sits on the sofa, lips tight; an expression passes over his face and is gone. "Very well, then."

"Okay. Okay. And if in five minutes you want me to shut up, get out, anything at all, I will. This is everything I've got. There's nothing else behind it."

"The clock is running."

John nods sharply. A moment of terror seizes him: in trying to play his recordings he'll instead erase every one of them – But his sister rehearsed him well. He finds the right function on his phone and taps Play.

The first recording is the one he made with Harry.

> John: Okay, so it's working now?
> 
> Harry: Yeah. Go on, then.
> 
> [sound of John clearing his throat]
> 
> John: Right. Okay. So, that time we had dinner, when you, um, teased me about me and Sherlock being involved. And I said we weren't.
> 
> Harry: Yeah …
> 
> John: And that was true. But, um. When I said I didn't have any feelings for Sherlock. I was lying. I don't think I was all the way in love with him yet, at that point, but I was getting there. And I didn't want to admit it, even to myself, so I lied. But I love him. I've been in love with him for years, I think.
> 
> [recording ends]

Sherlock still hasn't looked at John, but the quality of his attention has changed. Four minutes left, John figures; he can probably get through three or four more recordings.

> [recording begins]
> 
> John: Greg, uh, Molly, maybe just say you're both here.
> 
> Lestrade and Molly, simultaneously: Yes, John!
> 
> You bet, mate.
> 
> John: Thanks. Right. Oh, God, this is hard to do.
> 
> Molly: It's good, though!
> 
> John [weak laugh]: Yeah. So. Both of you have heard me say that I'm not gay and I'm not in love with Sherlock or involved with Sherlock romantically, or … mm. Well, we're not involved. But [speaking faster now] I have to tell the truth now. I do love him, I'm in love with him.
> 
> Lestrade: Ah, mate.
> 
> John: Thanks. Thanks, Greg; thanks, Molly.
> 
> [recording ends]
> 
> [recording begins]
> 
> John: Detective Inspector Donovan.
> 
> DI Donovan: Watson.
> 
> John [audible deep breath]: You used to wonder what I was doing with Sherlock. And, uh, I always tried to make it as obvious as I could that I wasn't interested in him in the way everybody thought. The way you thought, too, if I'm right.
> 
> DI Donovan: I did, yeah.
> 
> John: But actually I've been in love with him for a really long time, and trying to pretend I wasn't.
> 
> [three seconds of silence]
> 
> DI Donovan: Hang on, didn't Greg tell me Holmes was the best man at your wedding?
> 
> John: Yeah, he was.
> 
> [silence]
> 
> John: I wish it was him I'd married. Except I can't imagine not having my daughter. Otherwise, though. It should have been hi–
> 
> [recording ends]

"Out of curiosity," Sherlock says, "how many of those did you think you were going to get through in five minutes?"

John always was bad at estimating time.

"Not – not enough of them, I guess. Or this was a stupid idea in the first place."

"Who else did you have this conversation with?"

John blinks. Not being shut down entirely, then? "Anderson. Sarah Sawyer, maybe you remember her from that case with Sebastian Wilkes. Uh, I found all the women I used to date. Them, and that couple from the Cross Keys, the blokes who owned the place. Angelo. Mrs. Hudson. I couldn't get everybody. Irene Adler. Mary, obviously. Mycroft wouldn't let me record him, but he sent me texts to show you."

From the couch, Sherlock extends his hand, palm up.

John watches Sherlock read Mycroft's texts, which he himself has memorized:

> MH to JW
> 
> _Dr Watson informs me that he is in love with you and that any previous protestations to the contrary may be disregarded._
> 
> MH to JW
> 
> _I believe him._
> 
> MH to JW
> 
> _My felicitations_.

Sherlock raises his eyes to John for the first time since entering the flat. "'Felicitations,'" he says, tasting the word, or being sarcastic; John can't tell which. "I'm going to play the rest of these."

John nods numbly.

He sounds different to himself, with the phone's sound coming from the coffee table where Sherlock has set it down. It's almost more embarrassing to listen in this way than it was to make his declarations in the first place. Sweat collects in the curve of his back.

> "I've got good and tired of not telling the truth about this … "
> 
> "I was well gone on him by the time you and I met. "
> 
> "You said I was a good boyfriend, but I didn't have the nerve to admit that was what I wanted to be." "But not to me." "No. I'm sorry. Not to you."

The recording from the Cross Keys – whether Billy or Gary, John isn't even sure:

> "You'll make it up with him."

To which John had replied: "I wish there was something _to_ make up."

And, finally and most painfully –

> John: … so I'm done pretending, is all. I do love him. You should know.
> 
> Mrs. Hudson: It's well past time you admitted it, John Watson. _He_ 's known his heart for a long time, and whatever people say about him, he's at least honest with himself.

At this, Sherlock draws in a breath and stops the recording. "I've been very obvious, it seems."

"I – I don't know, Sherlock. _I_ was obvious, yeah. Not one of those people was surprised at anything except me finally having the guts to admit it. So."

Sherlock uses one finger to align the long edge of John's phone parallel to the long edge of the coffee table; then sets it so its long edge parallels the width of the coffee table; then angles it to bisect the corner of the coffee table at forty-five degrees. "I hadn't given any thought to this outcome," he says eventually. "I've focused on the attempt to … be content with things as they were, I suppose. Though, as you've seen, not with success." He gives John half a smile. "I've no idea what comes next."

"I didn't think past hoping you'd hear me out."

They remain in this absurd position for a moment, with the coffee table between them, John's back to the flat door. John feels melancholy and rather tired, a combination that wouldn't have figured in any list he made of what he might expect to feel this evening.

Sherlock says, "Perhaps if you sit down," and shifts over so that he's no longer expressing sovereignty over the entire couch as he was from the central position he took earlier.

John sits. There's air between them, though, which seems wrong. He looks to Sherlock for a clue.

"Well," Sherlock says, deadpan, "we could go to Angelo's, and request a candle."

John laughs a little. "I need to arrange a minder for Emilia."

There's another silence. It occurs to John that he and Sherlock have come to an understanding. He takes Sherlock's hand.

Sherlock's eyes go wide.

John pulls away so fast he hits himself in the leg. "God, sorry sorry, I thought – "

Sherlock snatches John's hand back.

"Oh. So – that's okay?"

This gets another of Sherlock's half-smiles. "I thought it was traditional." Then, almost under his breath: "You do realize my practical experience is limited."

"Your imagination isn't, though."

Sherlock frowns.

"The things you said to me that night. They were dead sexy, even as angry as you were at me. So sexy. About" – here John falters, because though he has said all the words he has about love, he hasn't yet spoken his desire, and that's where this goes, isn't it? to skin, and hands, and kisses, and hard cocks, and what will it feel like to press himself against Sherlock's chest, his belly, and _oh God fucking maybe fucking_ – "about how my touch made you feel. And about what it might be like if I kissed you. And about touching me."

Maybe it shouldn't be any surprise, he thinks, that his breath is coming a little short.

Sherlock's expression is the one John caught sight of at the wedding reception, tender, a little hidden, his gaze cast down. He shifts on the couch again, this time so that he's angled toward John, and raises his free hand toward John's face. His first touch is so clearly the touch he might use with a new specimen that John has to smile. "Go on, then."

So encouraged, with his forefinger Sherlock traces John's eyebrows, the curve of his ear, the line of his neck. He rests his palm against John's cheek. He cups the back of John's head. It becomes apparent to John that somehow in all this, their faces have drawn close and that he, too, has a hand available with which to touch Sherlock, so he draws his thumb along the seam of Sherlock's lips. These part and close, part and close, delivering soft anemone kisses as John's thumb moves. No, a thumb won't do at all, John has to kiss that mouth with his own mouth, this seems to be urgently necessary all of a sudden, 999 will have to be called if he doesn't kiss Sherlock _immediately,_ so he does it, rests his lips against Sherlock's with exactly as much pressure as Sherlock's hand is exerting as it cups John's head – no pressure at all, that is, just resting, feeling Sherlock's breath enter his mouth and his own breath enter Sherlock's mouth; Sherlock makes a tiny, tiny noise that creates a new urgent necessity, namely that John suckle at Sherlock's lower lip and then at his upper lip. This happens, again averting the need to phone for emergency services, and furthermore their mouths have managed to angle themselves correctly for a deeper kiss now, with tongues involved, also Sherlock is grabbing at John's shoulders and John is bearing Sherlock down backward onto the sofa with one arm around Sherlock's back and the other hand gripping Sherlock's arse from underneath his left thigh, Sherlock having worked out with extraordinary rapidity that a good thing to do with that leg would be to wrap it around John's backside.

Sherlock breaks the kiss and presses his forehead against John's shoulder, where he mutters something.

John assumes the worst and starts to push himself up, but Sherlock shakes his head and keeps him where he is. "What I said was that my imagination isn't nearly as vivid as I believed it to be."

"Oh," John can only say, "oh," so he kisses the side of Sherlock's face over and over, in lieu of magically becoming articulate.

"John," Sherlock puts in, somewhere around the fortieth or fiftieth of these kisses, "two aspects of our present situation suggest themselves to my notice."

 _Our hard-ons?_ John is tempted to reply. He bites his tongue, however, and leaves off kissing Sherlock, the better to listen.

Sherlock, evidently reading John's mind, huffs at him. "No, not those. Well, yes, those, but not – er. One, I'm still wearing my coat, and it is superfluous to requirements." John hauls him up and shoves the Belstaff off him. "Two" – and is that hesitation John hears? – "I have a comfortable bed at no great distance." Yes, it was hesitation, because Sherlock's next sentence comes in his lordly, indifferent, I-am-above-you-puny-mortals-so-you-will-not-notice-that-I-am-nervous-or-uncertain tone:

"I'm no _virgin,_ John."

"Mmm, no," John says, kissing him again, and thinks _but I distinctly remember you snapping at me that you don't know whether you kick in your sleep._ So Sherlock has had sex, but never anyone to spend the night in bed with him, it seems. "Er, I just have to get the baby monitor." John has enjoyed the hell out of any amount of hasty and even furtive sex, but most of it happened with women he would have been pleased to wake up with, even if the affair lasted just a night or two. He picks up the monitor from the coffee table and tugs Sherlock up toward him to kiss him again: thinks now of Sebastian Wilkes saying, "We all hated him," and, with shame, of himself saying, "Colleague" – another of the irretrievable occasions on which he disparaged his relationship with Sherlock, to protect himself or fuel his own sense of importance. And Sherlock said, "I never expected to be anyone's best friend." John will wager that no matter what Sherlock's sexual experience is by the numbers, it hasn't included much in the way of affection. He feels ferociously angry, ferociously tender, and a little scared. There's still more to understand. Oh, yes, that's what it is: he wasn't afraid only of being gay; he was afraid of being wholehearted. There is no way for him to be with Sherlock except wholeheartedly. All right, then.

Even when a couch and a bed are barely two dozen feet apart, it is not possible to walk gracefully from one to the other when you both have erections and you are nervous and in love and want desperately to impress each other and one of you is carrying a baby monitor and hoping that his daughter, who at a year and a half of age mostly sleeps through the night, will not pick this of all nights to be wakeful. Consequently, in the eight and a half seconds that elapse between Point A and Point B, awkwardness swamps both John and Sherlock and they stand looking at the bed with their hearts pounding and their clothes on and not the faintest notion of how to get their clothes off. At last (that's to say: after another three seconds, or perhaps it's four), John remembers that he's meant to be the suave and experienced one here, also that he surely still has much ground to make up with respect to encouraging Sherlock actually to believe that he, John, loves and desires him, so he sets down the baby monitor on the bedside table and, now that he has two free hands, places one on Sherlock's shoulder and the other on his cheek and kisses him again.

The sense of incipient comedy dissolves.

"Oh, your _mouth,_ " John says, "your beautiful, beautiful mouth," and he somehow continues to kiss Sherlock's mouth while also stopping in from time to time at each of Sherlock's collarbones, and oh, there is his sternum now that John has undone the first two buttons of his shirt, so John kisses that as well. Also: nipples to lap at, so he laps at them and then takes each in turn between his lips to suckle. So small, so much smaller than a woman's nipples, but it seems they pack a wallop because at the suction Sherlock makes another of those minute exciting noises such as he made earlier, on the couch when they were kissing, and he seizes John's shoulders and pulls him down so that they are, at last, conveniently, on the bed.

"You," Sherlock says, "let me, you must – " He has very good hands, Sherlock does, deft even when he's beside himself, so it's John whose shirt comes off first. John is quite eager to feel his and Sherlock's bare skin together and retains enough reasoning power to work out that he needs to finish opening Sherlock's shirt if this aim is to be accomplished, so he does that. They clutch at each other, rubbing their mouths over each other's shoulders and necks and upper arms, and now John begins to think with some fervor and hardly any trepidation of Sherlock's prick, which he can feel riding against him through their trousers and where he would like to continue this project of kissing and suckling and rubbing. Accordingly he forces himself up off Sherlock and takes hold of Sherlock's trouser button. He looks for permission and finds Sherlock staring at him wide-eyed and panting – "Yes?" John says; Sherlock replies, "What? Yes what? Oh my trousers, yes, why are you – _John,_ " he concludes as the trouser button opens and the zip comes down. "Shoes," Sherlock says, reasonably, and makes some convulsive movements with his feet that result in his shoes' hitting the floor. John tugs at the waistband of Sherlock's trousers and pants; Sherlock lifts his hips but John's patience with peeling off tight clothing gives out almost at once, so pants and trousers wind up hanging off Sherlock's right ankle. "Oh God, oh God" is what John now finds to say. He kisses Sherlock's thighs and the tip of his cock and then forces himself away again long enough to shuck his own trousers – and Christ on a _raft_ what are _his_ shoes doing still on, has he _no sense,_ so he rips them off his feet and throws them in exasperation toward the bedroom door. Then, finally, he stretches himself out on Sherlock's naked body and Sherlock takes John's face in his hands and kisses him, wrapping his legs around John and arching upward to press their genitals together. Some incoherent whining noises occur whose source might be either or both of them.

The texture of Sherlock's cock lingers on John's lips, delicate. He wants to know more about it. Should this feel strange? He has never sucked a cock before; has never touched another man's penis except as doctor touching patient. Perhaps he'll experience a new appreciation for penises now, for the bodies of men generally. That will be an interesting discovery, but this penis, this one only, belongs to the love of his life, and the thought that he has the freedom and the ability to bring Sherlock pleasure in this way makes him almost frantic to begin. To do this for the first time.

The words with which John expresses his wish are "Sherlock, I want to – Can I – ?" which are nonspecific in themselves but John provides helpful clarification by stroking Sherlock's sides and kissing him along the midline, working downward kiss by kiss until his face bumps into Sherlock's erection. Sherlock now says something ridiculous, "Ifyouwantto" all in a rush, as though John might still need an out. "I do, I want to," John replies, but as it is impossible to do two things with one's mouth at the same time, and John is prioritizing kisses and licks, his response is muffled. Sherlock seems to understand it anyway and his head falls back. John parts his lips just enough to press between them, softly, carefully, the skin along Sherlock's cock, and then the tops of his thighs along the crease. And the insides of Sherlock's thighs, which are now trembling. John takes the weight of Sherlock's balls in his cupped hand and nibbles at the skin. He opens his mouth wider and wraps it around as much of Sherlock's sac as he can. The hair is rougher than most women's; a loose bit gets between his teeth. Well, that's grounding. John removes the hair from his mouth and keeps nuzzling at Sherlock's balls. Wait, is he hanging back from actual cocksucking? No, this is already in the spirit of cocksucking if not yet in the letter. But. Above him Sherlock is gasping and biting at his thumb, apparently trying not to cry out. John wants to hear everything his _lover lover lover_ has to say so he makes a detour back up to Sherlock's mouth to take hold of his hand and whispers in Sherlock's ear, "No, but your sounds, love, I want your sounds, please"; Sherlock nods and simultaneously makes a noise like "Huh, huh, huh," which makes John feel like crying for a moment. (Later he will realize this is because his beloved is the best-defended citadel perhaps in the entire world and for him, for John, the gates are open.) He drops back down, makes as much saliva as he can, drips some onto the tip of Sherlock's cock which is already wet, and, taking hold of the base, closes his mouth over the head. Sherlock cries out and thrusts, which – okay, John wasn't quite ready for that. Women have sometimes angled a forearm over him to hold him steady and now he fully empathizes with their reasons. He accordingly settles himself over Sherlock and starts again: he spreads precome and saliva all over Sherlock's cock and takes it in his mouth, still holding the base in his hand. Sherlock is very clean. The taste and odor of the day's sweat, just going musky, are in his pubic hair and under his foreskin; John humps a little in reaction, surprising himself but then, on second thought, surprising himself hardly at all. Sherlock's thighs are now not merely trembling but outright shaking. None of the sounds he makes have any consonants in them. John covers his teeth with his lips and draws his mouth around Sherlock's cock, down and then up, down and then up; he rubs his tongue all around the head and laps along the underside of the shaft, pressing into the smoothness; his mouth and Sherlock's cries keep time with each other. This does not go on long. Sherlock must have got a sex-etiquette lesson somewhere along the way, because he makes a panicked-sounding noise and tugs at John's hair. John makes a corresponding noise in the negative and hangs on tight. He's not at all sure he's going to like this next bit but he wants more than anything, it is imperative, to accept all of Sherlock into himself, so he does, and it's – not terrible: John swallows hard once, twice, three times and suckles gently, getting used to the feeling of salt at the back of his throat, as Sherlock goes soft. After a bit, Sherlock twitches his hips away, so John wipes his mouth against his wrist and comes up for kisses. "Oh," he says, "I love you: you didn't wake the baby."

"Oh. Oh. _Oh,_ " Sherlock says toward the ceiling, and then shakes himself. He frowns at John. "You _fellated_ me."

"Yep," John agrees cheerfully before he catches Sherlock's tone.

"You swallowed my semen."

"That too. – Sherlock, what's wrong?"

"You're not sorry."

"It's bad that I'm not sorry?" Now that John sees where this is going, he follows his question with a kiss to Sherlock's neck.

"You're not worried."

John nuzzles Sherlock's shoulder. "What would I be worried about? Infection? You'd never let my mouth anywhere near your knob if there was a chance you had an STD."

"You're happy."

"Sherlock, you nit, I've spent weeks wondering whether if I hadn't already ruined everything I was going to finish the job with my stupid recordings. Instead" – John indicates the two of them – "I'm in bed with the love of my life. Of course I'm bloody happy." Though his erection _is_ still announcing itself. He shifts against Sherlock uncomfortably.

"Oh!" Sherlock says. He slithers out from under John, hauls open the drawer of the bedside table, and comes back with a squeeze bottle of Glide. Seeing John see it, he looks abashed. "Well. I think of you sometimes, and … " A quick glance at John's face. "The truth is, it wasn't very … This is better."

John draws in a breath, thinking that he needs to spend the next decade or so making soppy romantic gestures until Sherlock gets good and sick of them.

But then Sherlock delivers one of his genuinely amused, fond smiles, and says,

"Of course, the unsatisfactory nature of my undertakings has one advantage: I have a great deal of this stuff left." He squeezes an immense puddle of Glide into his palm, breathing over it to warm it, braces himself over John, spreads lube … everywhere, over John's cock, his balls, his perineum, his arse; and then spends an eternity running one finger up from John's arse along his perineum and along the seam of John's balls up the underside of his cock and down the top and then circling the root of John's cock and taking the same route back to where he started. Next he does the same thing with two fingers, and smiling with it, until John is reduced to clutching at the sheets and at Sherlock's braced arm, chanting "Fuck, fuck, fuck, please, fuck," and then finally, just about when John is sure he's going to start screaming or just fly apart and break down the walls of Sherlock's bedroom with impossibly accelerated bits of himself, Sherlock pumps him hard and fast and John really does fly apart except that he comes to himself afterward to find that he is not only in one piece but feeling better than he can remember in a long, long time, and furthermore that Emilia, bless her heart and her toes and the depth of her baby sleep, has still not woken.

"You said it was just being out of context that made me think I was in love with you," John tells Sherlock, "and that once we were back where I had told everybody we knew that it wasn't like that, I'd see I didn't love you after all. But you were wrong. I was in love with you anyway. So I told everybody so. Changed the context, see?"

But Sherlock is already asleep. Not very long afterward, John follows him.

**Author's Note:**

> Effusive gratitude is due to MirithGriffin, whose brilliant and lightning-fast beta did so much to improve this story, and also greatly benefited John's fellatio technique. Warm thanks also to TSylvestris, who reassured me concerning my recipient's probable reaction.
> 
> Like the whole fandom, I owe much to Ariane DeVere for her transcripts on LJ, where I found the names of the Cross Keys guys and the snippets of show dialogue that appear here.
> 
> I was thrilled and honored to have you as my recipient, Mildredandbobbin! I hope you have as much fun with the result as I had writing it.
> 
> Here’s the hotel room: http://www.travelodge.co.uk/hotels/6/Barton-Mills-hotel.
> 
> The Baker Street Wiki gives only Jeanette and Sarah names, so I winged it. The Holmes parents don’t have given names in the series, either, so more winging. Or pengwinging, IDK.


End file.
